Today it is cloudy for the first day since I’ve been here. Living in Santiago is very much like living in a climate-controlled bubble most of the time. Every day it gets up to about 80 degrees during the day and down to around 50 at night, but it is always sunny and the sky always clear. It does, in fact, freak me out a little bit that there are clouds, after living here for a month. But apparently we’re getting on toward winter and it’s supposed to be rainy this year.
Speaking of rain, that’s basically all it did while I was in Patagonia this weekend. The end of the world was very damp. And cold. And involved eating large amounts of peanut butter and trail mix, and living with three sweatshirts on at all times. However, the views were gorgeous. The sky there is ever-changing, so sunset is a spectacle. Watching the sun reflect off these snow-covered mountains and bouncing off the clouds turning the sky into a spectrum of deep violet to turquoise is amazing, and most definitely not something that can be caught on film. A fact that didn’t end up concerning me much since I realized my camera’s batteries were dead about fifteen minutes after we got to the national park. I’ll just have to rely on others for a photographic account of the adventure.
There was also no pressing need to speak Spanish while there since 95% of the people we saw were foreigners, either from Europe or the US, with some people from Israel and other parts of Latin America thrown in. I also met far more students studying abroad with programs in Santiago in Patagonia than I have while actually in Santiago, including some that we met at a hostel and whose program office is right across the hall from ours. So, while traveling to Patagonia did not necessarily put me into contact with Chileans, I at least met some nice Americans.
I do now know a Chilean guy in one of my classes! For my jazz class we have a group project to do, and we had to pick groups on Monday. Being the optimist that I am, I went in thinking “oh shit oh shit I freaking hate the world no one is going to want to work with the stupid gringa I’m just going to end up working by myself because I’m a loser screw Chile screw these cliquey students screw this class I freaking hate this bullshit.” And then this kid named Pablo asked if I’d work with him. To which I responded with a somewhat vacant stare because I hadn’t had any coffee yet, and that combined with the shock of not being a social outcast caused me to lose all of my comprehension and speaking skills, in both Spanish and English. So now we’re doing a project on Cannonball Adderley and he greets me when I come into class. He’s really nice, so I guess working with a linguistically challenged gringa is enough of a novelty to be entertaining, because my sparkling personality has yet to show itself. But I feel much less like a loser in that class now.
On Saturday I’m visiting the deepest copper mine in the world and the city that sprang up around it, home to the first bowling alley in Chile. The town, Sewell, was home to many transplanted families from the States, so it’ll be like mini-America. Kind of like the Disneyworld “it’s a small world after all” version of American life. I really hope we get to take a boat ride through it and marvel at the intricacies of American culture. We’ll just have to be careful not to fall off the edge into the squalid living conditions of the people who actually worked in the mine. It’ll be fun.
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